Friday, January 6, 2017

Taking on cognitive bias in 2017

With a slewoffake newscontroversies behind us and a new
year ahead, here’s an idea for a New Year’s resolution: Think about how you
might be wrong.
Behavioral economist Richard Thaler made this suggestion last year in a podcast interview. In it, he discusses a number of cognitive biases
(or mistakes in memory, reasoning, or evaluating information due to previously
held preferences and beliefs) that affect our decision making. Among them was
confirmation bias, or the tendency to seek out and quickly believe information that
supports what we already thought to be true.

According to Thaler,

“One
of the reasons we’re overconfident is that we actively seek evidence that
supports our views. That’s true of everybody, that’s part of human nature, so
that’s one reason we’re overconfident; we’re out there looking for support that
we’re right. We rarely go out of our way to seek evidence that would contradict
us. If
people want to make a New Year’s resolution, it would be to test their strong
beliefs by asking what would convince them that they were wrong, then looking around
and seeing whether they might find some evidence for that.”

Confirmation bias is only one of
many ways our own thought processes can interfere with our critical thinking skills, and it's worth thinking about how these factors may change the conclusions we reach.

For
more information on cognitive bias and related topics, check out this fun, Mental Floss graphic or the library
resources below.